Wow, already 17 years has passed since I edited my first trailer for ZERO KILLED. In 1996 the project was called FORTYNINE which actually was released as a video-installation under this name in 2007 and finally was concluded as my first documentary feature film in 2011. Funny that back then I thought the film was going to be released in 1997 as revealed in the credits by the end: “COMING IN OCTOBER ’97”.

‘Zero Killed’ has been selected as on of 18 finalists that will compete for a prize of $5000 USD. We are in competition because it won Best Documentary Award at the South Texas Underground Film Festival. Each year the festival sends it’s Best Feature, Best Short and Best Doc to compete in Austin, TX at the RxSM Film Expo from March 8-14, 2013. Three finalists will be selected to travel on to The Victoria Independent Film Festival, April 4-7, 2013, and split a prize of $5000. The winner of the Crossroads Award will win $2500, 1st runner up will recieve $1500 and 2nd runner up gets $1000.

“Zero Killed” is a documentary which examines murder fantasies. From 1996 on, Kosakowski produced films in which he asked people of different backgrounds about their thoughts of killing someone and then let them carry these out. These staged murders are the basis of “Zero Killed” and are acted out by the very people who had these fantasies. Ten years after the project ended Kosakowski set off again and interviewed the former protagonists about their intentions, experiences and the effect which “carrying out” their murder gave them. The insights which he gained varied greatly, but they all have one thing in common; everyone enjoyed the murder which they had originally just thought about. In “Zero Killed” film excerpts and interviews follow one another. The rapid switches between staged murder and recorded interviews lead the observer to alternate between different judgements of the same event. The protagonists enjoy talking about this forbidden theme, frequently with so much objectivity that it is difficult to believe these crimes did not take place. Kosakowski hints at an imagination which – if his interview partners are to be believed – is inherent in every one of us and which, despite all brutality, can also be felt as a liberation.

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. It’s not your usual horror movie that evolves out of an art installation, but Zero Killed began life in 2007 at the Lothringer13 gallery in Munich and, sure enough, it’s something rather different. It’s a cross between documentary and fake snuff film, but with an opposing emphasis to movies such as Man Bites Dog or Long Pigs. For a decade, beginning in 1996, filmmaker Michał Kosakowski asked a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds about their murder fantasies, then provided the gruesome means by which they could act them out in front of the camera. Kosakowski delivered everything needed to turn their fantasies into reality, if only in a fictional way, except one thing: he set the condition that they had to act in their little pictures themselves. Then, a decade on, he returned to his subjects, spread across five central European countries, to interview them about their experiences and how they might have been changed by them. Read the rest of this page »

The catalog for the exhibition ‘Kill’ in the Erlanger Kunstpalais was created in collaboration with the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg and treats interdisciplinary positions on killing. Michal Kosakowski’s video-installation “Do You Have Murder Fantasies?” was part of the exhibition amongst other international acclaimed artists.

Killer games, shooting sprees, honour killings, infanticides, lust murders, political murders, suicides, genocides, suicide bombers, terror attacks, wars and civil wars, the killing of civilians and killed soldiers: killing seems to have become omnipresent in our media-dominated world. But then why is this development hardly reflected in contemporary consciousness?

The aim of the exhibition is to examine this contradiction between awareness and reality. It analyses current expressions of killing in contemporary art and the way in which the unspeakable, unimaginable and unaccept able is perceived in this context. Twelve internationally renowned artists portray both the perpetrators’ and the victims’ perspective and examine killing both as a physical act and as a psychological fantasy. They create imminent pictures of killing and also develop abstract analyses of crimes. They explore social structures and individual depths, reflecting their presence in the media. Read the rest of this page »

Wednesday, January 23, 2013 was the rescheduled Flaherty NYC screening of Zero Killed, by Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Michal Kosakowski. The director and two of the film’s subjects, Sergio Figueroa and Dorit Oitzinger, were in attendance for a post-screening discussion with moderator Andy P. Smith. Zero Killed weaves staged murder fantasies together with interviews with those who thought them up. The film is based on a video installation comprised of 49 shorts in which subjects enact their own violent scenarios. For Kosakowski, constructing a film from the installation offered a way to transport the idea to a medium more accessible to a larger audience. Read the rest of this page »

Lord knows why I’ve been sitting on the DVD that German director Michael Kosakowski handed me at the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival last October. It played at AFI’s Silver Spring (Maryland) theater at the midnight show on October 12th (I was too tired to stay awake that night), and has had numerous screenings since (including it’s NYC Halloween premiere postponed courtesy of Hurricane Sandy). Earlier this week Cult Epics, a Los Angeles company owned by Nico B., acquired the U.S. and Canadian distribution rights, and a theatrical release here will be in April, followed by a DVD release on June 18th.

Anyway, the film handles the director’s penchant, since 1996, of “asking people with different backgrounds about their murder fantasies.” Hmmm, seems interesting/controversial in light of the recent uproar about gun control in the U.S.A. Kosakowski not only inquired about these reveries, but offered them a chance to stage them as films. Weird? Yup. Oh, he had one condition. They had to act in the films themselves…. Read the rest of this page »

We are very proud to announce that CULT EPICS has aquired U.S. and Canadian distribution rights of our film ZERO KILLED!. Owned by Nico B., the director of the experimental films ‘Pig’ & ‘1334’, CULT EPICS has released controversial movies such as ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, ‘Driller Killer’, ‘Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer’, ‘La Bete’ and ‘In a Glass Cage’.

‘Zero Killed’ will be released theatrically in April 2013. The first Single-DVD release will follow on June 18th, 2013. We will post more information about releases soon! Stay tuned…

Flaherty NYC is proud to host the New York City premiere of Zero Killed, the debut feature of Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Michal Kosakowski, which has steadily garnered acclaim across a number of international festival appearances. Since 1996 Kosakowski has interviewed dozens of common citizens from a broad swath of national and occupational backgrounds about their murder fantasies. He then offers them a chance to stage them as short films with the stipulation they appear as the perpetrators or victims. For Zero Killed, Kosakowski has revisited his interviewees, many over a decade after the fact, to discuss their emotional reactions to the experiments while further soliciting personal opinions about topics including war, torture, revenge, the death penalty and suicide. The interviews and staged films have been assembled into a running dialog about violence at base, personal and societal levels. The result is a streaming commentary that’s sometimes wryly amusing, often disturbing, and always provocative-a richly textured dissection of media and society that begs for the conversation to spill off screen.

Hi Folks! Happy New Year to all of you! This is our first screening of ‘Zero Killed’ in 2013! The inaugural Horror-on-Sea Film Festival will be held from January 18-20, 2013 in Southend-on-Sea, United Kindgom. Our film will be screened on

Chopping spree – ‘Tis the season for ghouls and gore at Another Hole in the Head film fest

by Cheryl Eddy | San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nov. 27, 2012

Closing night looks to be a decidedly less festive affair, with Austrian director Michal Kosakowski’s unsettling Zero Killed — a feature film spun from his video installation and short film project, Fortynine. From 1996 to 2006, Kosakowski interviewed people about their murder fantasies, then used the tales (suicide bombings, school shootings, dog attacks, dinner-party poisonings, stabbings, shoving people into traffic or letting them slip off cliffs, etc.) as short-film inspiration, starring the storyteller as either perpetrator or victim.

A haunting musical score ups the creep factor, as Kosakowski tracks down each participant (many, but not all, are actors by trade) to interview them about their specific fantasies and other troubling topics, like revenge, torture, and “What is evil?” Zero Killed is a uniquely disturbing mix of fiction and documentary, cutting between horrific, blood-soaked vignettes and clinical talking-head interviews — often featuring the same subject.

IndieFest’s Another Hole in the Head Sets the Table for Its 9th Gory Season

by Jackson Scarlett | 7x7SF, Nov. 29, 2012

The macabre closing night film of this year’s HoleHead is, by technical description, a documentary–and not of the Tobe Hooper variety either. Pairing staged footage of homicidal fantasies told to him by interviewees (on the condition that they act in them as either as the murderer or victim) with years-later decompressions on subjects like torture, the military, and media dominance, German director Michal Kosakowski’s film plays out like a grim riff on Michael Apted’s Up series. Ranging from absurd bloodbaths to chilling snuff films, the most effective vignettes play out in stark counterpoint to the interviews, adding a heightened meaning to the necessarily political talk on display.

Another Hole in the Head Film Festival screens loads of murder and mutilation, but audiences tend to be a jovial bunch, according to founder George Kaskanlian Jr. “It’s kind of like … a reunion every year,” he says. “A lot of people know each other and feel comfortable screaming, saying stupid stuff and having a good time.” This year’s edition, continuing through next Sunday at the Roxie, includes “G-String Horror” (Wednesday), shot by Charles Webb at the old Sid Grauman movie palace in San Francisco. The festival also presented “The Killing Games,” rejected by the Edmonton International Film Festival for being too graphic. Does Kaskanlian draw the line at extreme screen violence? “There is no line,” he says. “People know what they’re getting when they come to the festival. If a movie is too gory, we’ll make it a late-night screening.”

Closing-night film “Zero Killed” pushes that envelope. “People get interviewed about their murder fantasies and then they re-enact them,” Kaskanlian says. “When I was watching it for the first time … I got pretty weirded out because I thought it was real. ‘Zero Killed’ was pretty crazy. I thought, ‘I’ve got to put this in the festival.’ ”

Since 1996, Kosakowski has filmed enactments of people’s murder fantasies. The director’s only caveat is that the fantasist performs onscreen as either a killer or a victim. These homicide enactments utilize everything from poisoning to mass school shootings. Excerpts from these short films get paired with semi-classical music and present day interviews with the film participants regarding the intersection between killing another human being and society.

True to the title of Kosakowski’s film, nobody actually dies in these staged enactments. Yet the blood sprays and brutal shootings depicted in these murder fantasies will raise doubts in viewers’ minds.
Are these homicide fantasists a danger to society? If one were to judge by these fantasists’ onscreen interviews, none of their faces display mental illness or sociopathic calculation. Yet does the power to imagine considering using a victim’s nose for stew meat makes that speculating person a potential killer? Or does the experience of facing the darker parts of their nature make these murder fantasists emotionally stronger than advocates of behavioral suppression? Read the rest of this page »

“The best feature award goes to Michal Kosakowski’s darkly introspective documentary Zero Killed. One judge praised its originality in blending candid discussion interspersed with short films. It was also praised for it’s bravery in looking at darkness head on without being sensationalistic about it. It was also noted that the short films in the documentary, many of them made by non-filmmakers, were extremely real and effective. This was probably due to their unique level of sincerity. Congratulations to Michal Kosakowski on winning the trophy for this 16-year project!”

Now this is filmmaking, even if it’s seems a tad amateur, it’s still brilliant. The concept, not the freshest since the fall of the western world but nevertheless, definitely plays into the human psyche of wanting to kill someone after they have fucked with you. I couldn’t think of a more original thing to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon other than finding a victim, torturing the bejesus out of them, and then systematically putting them out of their misery in any way conceivable. This may truly be art…

Quiet on set! Oh hello, I was just about ready to get into my directors chair. Now I know what you are thinking you’re a writer, what’s with all this film making mumbo jumbo? Well I’ll tell you; I was about to start production on a little script I wrote entitled “Death to all Lyzards”. You like? I thought you would. It’s a straight to the point feature with a plot so brilliant it will have you chewing your fingers right down to the bone. Want to hear it? Well it begins on a fine day quite like today and ends up with me the Lyzard King brutally murdering all Lyzard impersonators in the most creative way possible. You’re thinking it’s ok maybe a little cheesy but hey let me ask you this then; don’t you ever have any murder fantasies? Read the rest of this page »

Once again we are proud to announce that ‘Zero Killed’ has been nominated for the SILBERNE HAND Award – Best Mutilation Scene at the Fright Nights Horror Film Festival in Vienna, Austria (Nov 17-24). Oh yeah! The Festival-Jury has chosen the scene with Max Boehme and Dorothée Berghaus – the so-called “Parkettboden-Mord” (“Parquet Floor Murder”) where Max uses his axe…